The 6 Things You Need to Know about Sundar Pichai’s India Visit and Google’s Plans for India

Sundar Pichai, the Indian-origin CEO of Google, is in India right now. During a company event where he gave a Google for India keynote speech, Mr. Pichai spoke about the plans that Google has outlined for India. Here are the highlights.

2. India-centric programmes

These will include Tap to Translate: where users can tap on text in Hindi and other local languages to translate it to English. There is also an Indic keyboard, which users can use to type in 11 languages. From 2016, live cricket scores will be available via Google Search. Keeping in mind current limits on Indian connectivity, Google will retool its services to also work with low internet speeds.

3. Utilising India’s impressive engineering talent

With 1.5 million engineers graduating from Indian colleges every year, India has the largest — and some of the best — engineering talent in the world today. Google plans to hire a large number of engineers for its proposed Hyderabad campus. It will also work with the National Skill Development Corporation of India to train over 2 million engineers on its Android platform over the next 3 years.

4. Project Loon

Through its Project Loon, Google hopes to ramp up connectivity across India.

“When a natural disaster hits, people often get no network coverage, as it happened in Chennai as well. Project Loon is focussed on providing connectivity in rural areas, and we can use software to position these balloons to areas where there’s no coverage or network capacity is less,” Mr. Pichai said.

6. Railway stations with free wi-fi

Reiterating Google’s plans to bring high-speed access to Indian railway stations, Mr. Pichai said that this project should go live in Mumbai by January 2016.

Besides this speech, Mr. Pichai also had a casual conversation with students of Delhi’s Sri Ram College of Commerce, where over 1,800 people attended. During the talk, he spoke about a key ingredient required to create a climate of entrepreneurship — risk taking. He asked Indian students to take more risks in life.

“I think the Indian education should allow a system of creativity, project-based, experiential learning. We should teach students to take risks and not penalise them,” he told the audience.

He also emphasised the importance of working with people more experienced than oneself.

“It is always good to work with people who make you feel insecure about yourself. That way, you will constantly keep pushing your limits,” said Mr. Pichai.

You can watch the entire talk here:

The 43-year-old Sundar Pichai assumed position as the CEO of Google in October 2015. He grew up in Chennai, India.

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